I would like to wish all of you a happy new year, I wish you to have some plans or idea’s, some goals and aspirations, and I wish even more, that some of them work out in this coming year, that you can work on personal growth and happiness. 

Time to look ahead, never sure what another year will bring, I love my teaching job, so I hope being able to continue teaching photography, I look forward to further work with women, making beautiful images, I would like to travel some, keep staying in touch with my fast growing boys, try some new photography things, keep my eyes open and try to stay healthy.

Time also to look back at what has been in this previous year. I haven’t really counted it out, but I did less ‘free work’ photoshoots than the year before, but covered more other theme’s like landscape, travel photography and architecture. I think that’s nice, but it also kind of boggles me. What kind of photographer am I, what kind of photographer do I want to be. Is there a way of becoming a good photographer, with a distinct style when tackling all kinds of different subjects. Where does this all lead to? … do you know? This reminds me of the discussion I had with C. Coigny early 2017, when visiting his exhibit in Tournai (Belgium). He said, don’t bother, even if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll eventually get there …

I often get the remark that it cannot be too difficult making beautiful pictures from good looking, young women. This has lead me to the start of a new project “The age of beauty, the beauty of age” for which I’m looking for 50+ ladies, wanting to pose in my style. This to show my audience that beauty is not solely age-related, and that every age has its own kind of beauty. If you know someone that might be interested in posing, please let me know. I have done two shoots for this project, but I will be waiting till I have a complete series before showing them to the world.

I started self-developing my films later this year, bought me some secondhand equipment, a bottle of Ilfotec 29 developer, stop and fixing bath, and went on from there. I developed 9 rolls of 120 film and still have a lot to learn, but self developing opens doors to bigger camera formats like 4×5 Inch. Lab development for sheet film is outrageously expensive and out of reach for my budget, self developing is feasible and reasonably simple. Next step will then be to get a decent digital file from a large format negative. The resolution of my Canon 5Ds will no longer be sufficient for the huge amount of detail in a large format negative. One step at a time, You’ll eventually get there, remember. 🙂

Thank you for your continued support in visiting this site and blog. It drives me to continue writing posts and publishing images. Some articles get more attention than others, but that’s absolutely fine with me. At this moment (dec 31 4:28pm) I count 95.103 Visitors and 412.912 visits. That is roughly +100% visitors and +25% visits compared to last year.

You come from all over the world, with 201 countries represented, USA leading with 27 thousand visitors, next comes Belgium with 11.113 visitors and at the end of the line a lot of countries with one visitor 🙂 some of them I’ve never heard of, sorry. …(Mayotte, Tokelau, Nauru, Vanuatu, …)

I have published 56 posts in 2017, bringing a total of 397 published posts. You’ll need a couple of days if you want to read trough them all. That is probably the small spikes in the yearly visitor chart, someone started reading and couldn’t stop anymore: 

So thank you all again, please do not hesitate to comment, send me a note if you have a question, send me a dollar if you want to sponsor me (Paypal – info(at)renderhouse(dot)eu), and please continue visiting my blog.

some highlights of this year:

from the fantastic cooperation with Riona Neve,

• The spirit of Ecstasy •

 

Discovering the work of Christian Coigny, meeting the artist.

 

Shooting analog only for a short story

• smashing the studio • or how to convince your models to take a sledge hammer and ruin the radiators for a more realistic result,  blood and bruises inclusive.

 

Street photography in Paris with the Rolleiflex TLR

 

Publication in Goodlight Magazine

 

A group exhibit in Ronse, my home town. Invited by the local photography club.

Bald and beautiful with Marlies

 

Memorable motorcycling trip trough Scotland

 

The flower girl series, with Eva Evian

 

Getting soakin’ wet trying to capture this water stream in Scotland

 

Gathering my landscape work in a book volume

• Landscapes and other things that jump into my camera •

An exhibit in my own place. Sold 9 limited edition books, 6 fine art prints. First exhibit that covered its own expenses.

• Vamos a la playa! • an analog picture from my collaboration with Carlotta Kah in Corsica.

Trying some flash studio work with the Rolleiflex TLR. Making portraits from some friends.

Inspired by the work of Coigny: • Forgotten •

Another publication in ModellenlandMagazine

looking for inspiration, late Marc Lagrange

 

Saul Leiter

Don’t hold back, just re-read my 2017 posts if you want to find out all about it.

time to close this post, need to fix some supper, my wife had an unforeseen chirurgical intervention a couple of days ago, so I’ve become master chef, master household, master everything, this last week in 2017. Wish you all the best for 2018! Hope to meet again!

 

Ludwig

below, self portrait with the Voightländer Bessa 6×9 format.